Pearls

Ziva sent us an article she couldn't believe: a write up in El Nuevo Herald about an obscure sexual practice in Cuba.... The insertion of pearls in the penis for enhanced sexual pleasure.
The article paints the phenomenon as something new, which it ain't.
There were a lot of urban legends about the rich, the richer, and the richest in Cuba, and I recall listening to them when I was growing up. They were mainly about disolute lifestyle and of course about genital piercings -the Prince Albert for men, genital pendants and other jewelry for ladies- which were all the rage amongst the darling of a rarified upper class with some ties to minor European royalty.
In vernacular Habanero, when a woman behaves as she's better than every other woman in the face of the planet, people ask behind her back: "does she have a diamond down there?"(¿tendra un diamante alla abajo?) or when a man behaves very confidently about and around women, the vernacular goes like this: "he does have a pearl" (tiene una perla)
And yes, as the article goes, people really insert "pearls" in their penises, or at least some people do. As the situation of Cuba goes, there's no much jewelry around to perform the pearl job. The old favorites of gold, platinum, and pearls have been substituted by acrylic and plastics. These are "operations" performed on themselves or by somebody else on young men, specially the ones that are in the military service, intern schools, or in prison. Also, it was practised amongst some hippie groups in Cuba in the sixties, and amongst their heirs, the rockers and the freaks of the eighties and after.
Before kasstro got to power, this practice was not very widely seen in the country, and besides the original aristocratic types, only either famous pimps like Alberto Yarini y Ponce de Leon (please google his legend) and very famous prostitutes had "jobs" like that performed on them. At some point, the "press of the heart" let people know that some of the minor counts and countesses that were part of the Cuban hi-society of the day might have the same jobs perfomed on them in Europe, so some people emulated them, but it didn't become part of what the conservative Cuban society would do regularly. Like tattoos. Either you were a rich excentric to dare to have one or you were a low-life (I met an old gentleman who had a count crown tattooed in his wrist, in all details. He was a real count, and he had great stories to tell... one of them was the famous pearls)
Back to the intern schools, I knew some people who had the "work" done. People used to buy the "pearls" (synthetic) from merchant marines who visited Thailand, Holland, Japan, and other places that sound very exotic to a teenager's ears. They were not only round, they had other shapes as well, like discs, or lozenges. Now, the procedure was unsanitary, to say the least. Somebody slit his skin open, slid the "pearl" inside, and either crudely sewn his skin back together or placed a bandage with the hope of a rapid healing. I never knew of anybody (surprisingly enough) that had an infection, but surely, many people might have had horrifying experiences with that.
I know someone who had to explain the procedure to the American military authorities in 1994 when he was picked up from the Straits of Florida aboard a raft and was sent to Guantanamo Bay. In the medical examination the doctor asked: "what's that bump in your penis?". Needless to say that the voice spread around the base and the soldiers and everybody else wanted to know about that in detail!
And as the old count told me once.... The pearl thing went perfectly well with the appelative of Cuba in the old times: "La Perla de las Antillas", the Pearl of the Antilles.